“... Out of the Shelter (1970) recorded the encounter with ‘abroad’ after growing up in austerity Britain. Even Changing Places, still his funniest book and the one that made him famous, clearly reworked his own experience of going, as a lecturer in English at Birmingham, to be a visiting academic at Berkeley. And he has never hesitated to report directly on ...”

“... cause to resort to arms, and always found the arguments to justify it. It is not so long ago that Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, invited the media to a night-time parade of hundreds of his supporters as they waved their gun licences and threatened, in the name of democracy and the Protestant people, to use their weapons if ...”

“... that the two places where truly destabilising populist politics have been let off the leash are Britain and the United States. Looking at what we have allowed to happen, Trump must be licking his lips. Under winner-take-all systems, people who are happy to gamble away their nation’s security only have to get lucky once. Let’s hope it is only once.Neal ...”

“... Britain​ is good at producing historians, biographers, nature and travel writers and so on, but thanks, perhaps, to a not very extensive magazine infrastructure, powerful marketing departments at publishing houses, and a historical tendency to disaggregate writing into well-defined genres, it isn’t good at knowing what to do with writers who set out their stalls in the equivocal zone where the techniques of fiction and non-fiction intermingle outside the ambit of the novel ...”

“... the three great intellects of the 20th century. Who were the others? he asked. Albert Einstein and Ian Gilmour, she allegedly replied. Let no one say that Margaret Thatcher was a slave to consistency. Within four years, the Einstein of British Conservatism had been sacked from the Cabinet. This is not Ranelagh’s only eccentric disclosure. As well as being ...”

“... NUM – Arthur Scargill in particular – as the embodiment of all that she held to be endemic in Britain’s economic decline: monopoly trade-unionism in a state industry subsidised well beyond the point of efficient market forces and economic sense ... to her, the special place which the mining industry occupied in the industrial landscape was a major ...”

“... Marxism that always lay beneath his belief that Parliament was the medium through which, in Britain, socialism could be achieved, his love of philosophy and big ideas for their own sake – these marked him, despite his impeccably proletarian origins, as an intellectual of a type more common on the Continent. Finally his extravagance of both personality ...”

“... he started his affair with Lys (while still married to Jean and while Lys was still married to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made ...”

“... arranges things: Birkhead gets live zebra finches to mate with dead ones, Nicholas Davies and Ian Hartley make it possible for female dunnocks to take a third husband. Decades of accumulated work of this kind have changed our understanding of the nature of sex, reproduction and the different roles of male and female. From Darwin’s time up to the late ...”

“... Turpin’s ride lie much further back, in Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, in which the story is told of a highwayman who had successfully established an alibi by riding in a single day, without a change of horses, from Chatham in Kent to York, where he arrived in the afternoon: the jury refused to believe such a feat was ...”

“... together as a succession of details – not unlike the narrative of particulars that according to Ian Watt constitutes the ‘formal realism’ of the novel. Had Griffith already achieved a novelistic ‘formal realism’? Not exactly. As a storytelling medium, cinema lies somewhere between theatre and the novel, and Griffith remained pretty close to ...”

“... both as the symbolic victim of capitalism, and as the indomitable survivor, was not peculiar to Britain. Germinal was the great literary original, and the prophetic lines which close the book, a black avenging host preparing to stand up for their rights, the seed-corn of the future ‘slowly germinating in the furrows’, anticipates the epiphany of The ...”

“... state corporations. As Wilson’s Minister of Technology between 1966 and 1970, he had stood for a Britain that could be at home in the modern world. Whenever, during his time in office, British Rail announced the development of a new high-speed train, or the Atomic Energy Authority opened a new reactor, another steel and glass panel was added to the ...”

“... as a landmark in the new, anything-goes TV. He also brings out its ambiguities. He talks to Ian McShane, who plays the brothel keeper Al Swearengen, about working with David Milch, the show’s creator, and Paula Malcolmson, who plays Trixie, Swearengen’s moll.In one scene, Trixie gets roughed up by a customer and shoots him. McShane recalls, ‘I ...”

“... It is one of the striking features of the current political argument about the way healthcare in Britain should be funded that personal hypocrisy is not much of an issue. Tony Blair may not be able to bring himself to educate his children in the comprehensive system that has to suffice for most parents, but when it comes to health he is happy to take his ...”